Author: MsStovall313

It’s been exactly 498 days since I have written in this blog of mine. It’s been a rollercoaster of a year and a half, with super high highs and deep low lows. I’m happy to say I’ve recently been able to get off and catch my breath, which is good because I was starting to get super nauseous.

I can go into at another time, but 2017 was especially tough for me. It was the year that wasn’t. It was not fun. It was not a year of growth. It was not good. It just… wasn’t.

For example, in the fall of 2017, a friend asked me how things were going at school. Without even thinking. I replied, “I’m in the sunken place,” cueing a Get Out reference. I gasped and slapped my hands over my mouth at my response, but that’s how I honestly felt at that time while teaching at OPRF. My voice was silenced by racial equity leadership, and I was made to feel like I was no longer welcome to teach there by administration. Even with new additions to the school, it was clear that I was not going to be allowed to do racial equity work at OPRF, and I started to spiral. It’s hard to feel like you don’t belong in a place that used to be your home. And so I struggled with mental health, and even with therapy and changes in medication, it felt like I was sinking. And then 2018 came along, thank goodness.

2017 definitely taught me patience and pain, but thank u, next.

So onto the goodness of 2018. There were three major life events that have really taken the bitterness out of the sadness of the year before (I’ll put more amazing events in the pictures). I’m starting to transition from simply surviving to genuinely thriving, and for this, I am more grateful than I am able to express in the English language.

Reading at ancient Zapotec ruins.

Transformative Life Event #1: I Went on T.V.

Rewind to the summer of 2015. I had gotten back from New Zealand on my Fulbright, overflowing with ideas on how to eliminate racial predicatibilities in student academic achievement. Academy Award nominated film director Steve James and I were having a beer and burger, talking about the possibility of filming in my classroom that upcoming year. In my nervousness, I talked way too much about growing up in New Richmond, and my hardships of being a teacher of color in the building. Steve assured me that he was just going to film a couple of weeks, and that for a few teachers maybe a quarter or even a semester. But he made it really clear that he wouldn’t be in my classroom all that much.

Steve James getting ready to film my brothers and I playing basketball, while sound techniction Zak Piper mics them (this scene didn’t make the documentary. Thanks goodness because Danny dunks right over the top of me).

I chuckle at that now, as I ended up working with three out of the four film crews, and they filmed weekly the entire year, sometimes several times in one week. It became normal for my class and me to have a film crew in the room, and I could soon quickly and expertly get in and out of the wires of microphones between classes. Steve James and the rest of the film crew, especially Janea, Kevin, Rebecca, and Zak got me through that year. They were my constant cheerleaders–super excited about everything happening in my classroom and caring about all of the kids as much as I did. In a school where autonomy rules, it was so nice to get constant feedback and connection from people who actually seemed to care about me and the work I did in the classroom.

I’m unfortunately one of those teachers who has difficulty with work/life balance. When other more healthy teachers jet off to gyms, happy hour plans, or children, I’m usually in my slippers slippin’ around my classroom hoping to make enough noise to keep the nocturnal mice away. I’ve gotten much, much better than my first few years when I was known to leave school at the same time some people were leaving bars. Once, a former division head described me as someone who “burns a candle at both ends.”

Even though I’ve upped my social life and have reluctantly allowed some of my extracurricular school activities to be pried from my stone cold fists, I still have my occasional late nights. And they aren’t awful thanks to the night security guard Joe Beard.

You see, after my 8th period students shuffle or sashay out of my classroom, Joe will usually pop his head in to see how my day was and if I was staying late. If I was staying late, Joe would find ways to brighten my evening through frequent check ins, grabbing a seat in one of my big blue chairs, and telling jokes or making fun of me (with love of course). He’d keep me company while I graded quizzes or made lesson plans.

Sometimes Joe doesn’t catch me before I leave my classroom to do my usual 15-25 minute “hallway roam,” where I aimlessly walk the hallways talking to kids or waving at teacher friends in their classrooms. I’m a bit like one of those puppies who spins around and around before she finally feels comfortable and settles down. On those days, I’d often find Joe outside my classroom upon my return scolding me for not locking my door and having students sneak in my room to hang out. He was always worried about my valuables getting stolen, and he was always concerned with my safety and happiness. He did the same for the students who sought respite in my classroom.

If we are lucky, we will all have a Joe in our lives, a person who goes out of his or her way to be a constant flicker of light on not just our thunderstorm days, but also on those days where the added sunshine makes our beautiful days even more technicolor. And sometimes, if you are like me, you’ll take that light for granted, and you won’t realize how much energy you were getting from it until something snuffs out the light.

Joe suddenly passed away peacefully in his sleep on July 3rd, 2017. I found out from a former student, and the clouds rolled in and scrubbed the sheen from my summer. During his funeral, I sat next to one of my former students, and as life amateurs, neither of us had tissues. After a while, we gave up trying to stop our mascara from making black diamond ski trails down our cheeks until finally someone rescued us with some toilet paper. I spent the rest of the summer dreading returning to school as I’ve not felt ready to feel the emptiness of Joe’s absence.

Pictures of Joe from the cover of his memorial program.

I felt cloudy until this weekend when I prepared for students to start school on Tuesday. I started reflecting on the fact that Joe had given me an incredible gift. And so, in his honor this year, my mantra will be to be more like Joe. Instead of being that quasi-selfish “burning the candle at both ends” person, I want to be the light that brightens other people’s days. I’d like to think that Joe would love that, that I’m honoring him in that way by checking on people after school, making them laugh, and reminding them each and every day that they are important, that they matter. For that is what Joe gave to me. Because of him, I’ve never felt alone in a world that can be lonely.

So in this turbulent time where the heat of hate is radiating from marches in Charlottesville and around the country, I will make sure that love blazes brighter. In this way, I’ll make sure that Joseph Kenneth Beard will shine on.

I hope you will do the same in honor of the Joe in your life as well. In the thick of these whitewashed storms funneling in, we will all need the light in the darkness.

Let’s all buckle down and get our flashlights out, as our lights aren’t going anywhere. We will radiate love, respect, and empathy. Come what may, we must remember that Hope Dies Last.

In my senior capstone, I have students bring in precious objects that symbolize their childhood, and we spend the afternoon sharing stories.

Every year, I assign a final senior essay that is an inquiry about what the graduating students learned in high school. It’s an important reflection on their last four years of their lives, those years that are far too often a precarious bridge from childhood to adulthood. As I page through the reflections filled with their lessons, joys, and sometimes regrets, it is always evident that the real learning isn’t from the academic content of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, it’s from lunch table conversations, a whisper from a teacher, an F in math. It’s from being late to first period, sending silly snapchats in science, finding your best friend two seats in front of you in English, and from making (or missing) the honor roll or basketball team.

A hilarious page from a student’s graphic short story about how he went from getting in trouble in my class to totally kicking butt in it.

All the essays leave some sort of impression. I often get funny looks at the coffee shop as I sit in the corner and laugh aloud at funny lines, or sigh at the all too familiar feelings of social isolation and academic pressure. And every so often, I stumble upon an essay that scuffs its wet shoes on my welcome mat, makes itself a cup of tea, and lingers a while on my couch. This essay did just that. In fact, I even had to get a little more metaphorical honey for the tea. It represented the lessons and emotions of high school in such a genuine and raw way. I immediately talked to Jada–the beautiful author of this peice–to see if I could publish it on this blog. So here is what is learned in high school, the ugly and the beautiful, from her perspective (published with her permission).

I hope it makes itself at home for you that way it did for me.

Exposureby Jada

Telling your mother you want to kill yourself because of her is as earth shattering as the moment you took your first breath from the womb. I will soon find later that I allowed lies to slip through my teeth from anger. Pristine lungs that once filled with fresh air are nothing more than charred up lumps of coal from all the cigarettes I’ve smoked on the way home at 10:30 because I am trying to drown my sorrows in drugs that I don’t even understand.

“That’s just high school,” she says when I tell her I might commit tonight.

One of the best compliments I’ve ever received is a student telling me that my classroom felt like home. A colleague was running a workshop with my students, and they had to fill out these little color coded cards: light orange for important people in their lives, dark orange for important goals for themselves, green for important memories, and a peachy shade for important places. As I walk happily gallery-walking around the space to check out their lists, I halted when I saw this particular line of squares:

“My room?” I questioned, blinking uncomfortably fast to keep from showing that I was tearing up. “Yeah,” the student replied. Another student called, “It’s on my list too!”

The fact that a classroom can make a list of important places is important to me. Over the last ten years, I’ve become increasingly interested in classroom space and how a classroom’s look and feel contributes to students’ socio-emotional health and academic success. I grew up with the inspiration of my mum’s amazingly decorated third grade classroom. I know how I felt special and excited to learn in her room, and I wanted my own students to feel the same way. But yet, when I Googled or Pinterested (is that a verb yet?) “classroom decor,” 97.8% of the examples came from elementary and middle school spaces.

High schoolers deserve non-sterile and creative spaces to learn just as much as they still deserve scratch and sniff stickers (although the other week I accidentally gave them stickers that smelled like dirt, and I had to beg them to believe that I didn’t think their work was dirt).

And so I improvised and modified. At first, I decorated with mostly things that I loved. I put up pictures of my favorite books. I decorated entire walls with zombie memorabilia (did you know I have an obsession with zombies?). I hung postcards of my favorite places that I’ve traveled.

It begins in August. This is what my trunk looked like going into this school year. I think it took six different shops to get all of the supplies I need. Don’t worry–I’m a bargain hunting machine!

But you know what I realized? The classroom isn’t about me. In fact, I should switch the pronoun from “my classroom” to “our classroom.” If I want to support the multiple identities of my students, I need to make sure that the objects in my classroom reflect that value. And so, I started putting up things my students liked, as well as their work. I hung up gifts that they gave me. I handmade mailboxes so that each student could have a space to hold their journals and important papers. I now change my classroom each year with each new group of students, and it also changes throughout the year as we evolve throughout the year.

It’s made all of the difference. It used to be that after the bell rang at 3:04, my room would whoosh into silence after being filled with so much student chatter. But now, the voices and laughter can be found until I put on my coat, sometimes at 5:30 at night, while I exclaim, “I love you, but I really do have to go now!”

Above my door on the inside. Basketball hoop is key! Whenever my students are featured in news articles, I paste them underneath the ‘313 in the News” sign I made out of poster materials from Walgreens. The basketball hoop is one of my favorite additions to my classroom. Students shoot before school, in between classes, and after school. Some intense debates have been settled through shoot offs! I have some really squirrely freshmen in study hall, and they run from their previous class to get four and a half minutes of a basketball game in before the bell rings. And let me tell you, they get quite intense and once drew blood while a sub was there, but it makes study hall go much more quietly and smoothly in the long run. Trust me!

I love this idea for exit slips; thanks Pinterest! It’s awesome to have students (or teachers, as this picture shows reflections from a professional development workshop I gave) stick their musings to the door on the way out!

The bottom of my door on the inside. I got these felt stick-on letters in the bargain bin at Target!

I love doing warm fuzzies with my seniors. Students write warm fuzzies (little notes of appreciation and love that make you feel all “warm and fuzzy” inside after you read them) to each other all semester long, and then the students get to take their stuffed envelope with them as a parting graduation gift. Sometimes I buy fancy ones like this from the Chicago Teacher Store.

But if I’m low on cash, I’ll sneak these plain envelopes from the Division office and have students decorate them with pictures and words that best represent them.

One of my favorite additions this year is a life sized Frederick Douglass. Not only is he one of my all time heroes, but he is also a quiet and important watchful force in the room. I mean, seeing as this man sacrificed everything to read and write to gain his freedom, what student would dare not read in from of Freddie D. Right? (And he really is huge. I’m 5’11 to put him to scale).

As much as I love the opportunity to see stars from a different vantage point in the world, I’m terrified of flying to get there. So, as superstitious and silly as it may be, I must kiss every plane I walk onto. I’ve been caught once or twice by flight attendants who gaze at me with a mix between amusement and pity, and I’ve gotten ninja-quick with how fast I can kiss my hand and press it against the plane. Sure, it’s a small, futile gesture, but it’s something that calms the panic building up in my ears. And makes me feel oddly sunny to know that there are planes in the air right now that have my smooch-blessings on them.

I’m going to Washington D.C. to greet the newest batch of incredible Fulbright Teachers at their orientation. It’s strange to think that was me two summers ago, feeling mostly like I didn’t belong there, that they had chosen the wrong girl for the Fulbright. I was unconfident in myself, and I spent more time studying my shoes than facing forward toward the transformative experience that was to come. And now, two years later, I refuse to look down, and I find much gratitude in being able to embrace things head on.

Presenting at the Fulbright orientation last year

One of the most impactful sessions for me during the three and a half day orientation was on reverse culture shock. I had never considered that when I returned from my trip that I’d feel anything other than happy and grateful. But as the speaker Craig Storti, the author of The Art of Coming Home expressed, home has changed. And I have changed. When I returned, I did struggle with adapting with feeling like I constantly wanted to talk about this life-changing-sound-the-trumpets-I-uncovered-the-best-me-and-I-want-to-conquer-the-world-now year, but never actually talking about it as I felt that no one would really understand it. Luckily, the orientation helped me moved pretty seamlessly into my new kiwi culture, and it got me emotionally prepared for the occasionally turbulent transition back into US culture. But what it didn’t prepare me for was how occasionally funny that transition could be.

When my family picked me up on Christmas Eve eve from the airport, we decided to stop into Buffalo Wild Wings because I was dying for some Asian Zing chicken. Within a few moments, I turned to my brother Danny and exclaimed, “Why is everybody screaming?!”. For the first week or so, I felt like everyone was talking at me in all CAPS, and I put earplugs in my Amazon wishlist (which coincidentally I realized I still had in there as of a few days ago, so I swapped it for back-to-school scratch n’ sniff stickers).

I have always been a closet fanatic of musicals. I say “closet” as my bank account does not possess the sort of balance required to see the array of musicals I’d have to see in order to be considered a true connoisseur (I have never seen things like Cats or Phantom, for example). But I do enter lotteries and try to score rush tickets, so I’ve gotten to see things from The Lion King to Rent to The Book of Mormon. When alone in my apartment, if I’m not fervently listening to my latest audiobook (the current one being Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped), I’m singing along to Broadway showtunes. Believe me, I’ve put on some pretty elaborate productions complete with Rockette kick lines while washing dishes and making my bed. Idina Menzel would be proud.

I’m spending two weeks in the great New York City for a pretty amazing National Endowment of the Humanities seminar called “Freedom for One, Freedom for All? Abolition and Woman Suffrage 1830-1920.” As history is cyclical, it is so fascinating to see how relevant the issues of voting rights, the right to love, and the disenfranchisement of people of color are still so stubbornly present in today’s culture. It’s been an amazing seminar so far, but quite emotionally intense with a pretty hefty workload. I’m still able to see some of New York, but on each train ride, you can find me frantically reading and annotating our readings to and from my daily adventure.

Our two core texts for the institute.

Even though I’m trying desperately to save pennies, thanks to my new friend Laurie, I heard that the musical Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All that Followed was closing for good. The post-reconstruction era and the Harlem Renaissance are two of my favorite times in history to teach. Not to mention that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see the Audra McDonald live. And Tony winner Billy Porter. And Tony winner Brian Stokes Mitchell. And nominee Joshua Henry… And well, you get the point. The show is pretty much packed with some of the best talent on earth.

But tickets were sold out. I refreshed the seatgeek app several times an hour hoping that someone would give up his ticket, and I put up on ad on Craigslist. And then, on Saturday evening—the day before the show closing–some tickets suddenly popped up on the screen for the final show, and I typed in the numbers on my credit card faster than I could consider the price (I paid face value. But still). I would find out later that Audra McDonald called off and stated that she would not perform as the care of her baby comes first (did I mention that she tap dances, does incredible high kicks, and belts her esophagus out, all while in her second trimester?!), which is why so many people gave up their tickets. I’m glad that I a) did not know this fact and b) was happy to see that Audra did in fact perform the show closing. She is one phenomenal woman.

As seen outside the theater. #truth

I’ve never even so much as gone to a movie by myself, so I was a little intrigued to go a large broadway show stag. But I was fourth row center, so I figured that the performers will feel very much like my companions for the evening. It was an amazing experience to be almost close enough that if a character was downstage, he or she could spit on me when they over-enunciated words. It turns out that half of my row was solo, and so we found ourselves talking eagerly together in anticipation of the curtain opening.

It was thrilling to be in the caffeine of the packed house. And it really was packed, as people even stood and shifted their weight from foot to foot in their jagged line against the back wall of the theater. The only seemingly empty seat in the house was the one to my left. About two minutes before the opening note, an attractive man snuck into the seat next to me. “You made it!” I exclaimed with such exuberance, I’m pretty sure that the people in our close vicinity thought that we were friends.

“I better have,” he said, wiping sweat off of his forehead. “I called off in order to be here for this.”

“Oh?” I said. “What show are you in?”

“Motown the Musical,” he replied, looking a little embarrassed.

“What?! Cool! What role do you play?” I was suddenly proud my solo seat family thought we were friends.

“Marvin Gaye.”

“That’s so awesome! That musical is on my list of musicals to see!”

The light went out a little bit in his eyes. “You better go soon. We close next week.”

I had obviously struck a chord, and I stuttered a bit in my response. “Oh man, that’s terrible.”

“Yeah,” he said, not making eye contact, “The social climate is changing. It’s not one that’s as open for shows like us…”

He got cut off as the lights started to dim and people began cheering in anticipation at the start of the show. I clapped and hollered too, but what he said stung and the irony was not lost on me. Shows like us. Shows featuring predominately Black casts?

One of the highlights of my year of many highlights was the pōwhiri, or Māori welcoming ceremony. And I am now pleased to note that it’s now available for video streaming! I’ve completed a video guide (ah, the teacher in me) so you can see the elements of what is occurring, and I bolded the portions that were the most touching to me.

52:50-55:10Whakaratarata (Reception Line) Most powerful part of the ceremony: the kisses and hongi (pressing of noses). Every person in the room participated–it went on for quite a bit longer. My students said this was their favorite part!

After the ceremony, was the Hākari, or food, that lifts the weight of the sacred ceremony. All of the students from New Zealand and OPRF took off their shoes and entered the marae, and prayed and sang together. To say it was special and sacred, is to state an understatement.

E hoa ma, ina te ora o te tangata

My friends, this is the essence of life

I need pictures to say the thousand words I wish I could use to describe the incredible week I’ve just experienced.

During my time in New Zealand, (click here for a recent article on my Fulbright research and the subsequent exchange) working with indigenousMāori people allowed me the opportunity to witness first hand the profoundly positive impact that placing culture and heritage first in education has on eliminating the racial predictability of student academic achievement. I came back from my Fulbright experience a changed human. The trip inspired me to find my roots and ancestry through embracing the land, sea, and where I come from. Although my students couldn’t go to New Zealand this year, this exchange to Oak Park allowed my students to witness a new culture and ignite curiosities that will inspire them explore to US and the world in the future.

Through a serendipitous encounter in Rotorua, New Zealand (blog post to come), I had the great privilege to collaborate with Raewyn Tipene, the amazing CEO of the Te Kāpehu Whetū school in Whangarei, New Zealand, and together we worked on a cultural exchange between our two schools. It was meant to be, as the world renowned Field Museum has one of three marae, or Māori meeting houses, outside of New Zealand. The marae comes from the iwi (tribe) in Tokomaru Bay, and some of the students from the New Zealand school have ancestors from there.

In order to welcome them appropriately, we completed a pōwhiri , or a traditional welcome ceremony. And I can’t explain how much it touched me to bring 80 students and have them feel how I felt a year ago this week when I went through my own first pōwhiri . Because I can’t even attempt to adequately explain it, I’m using these pictures (best ones are towards the end!), taken by the amazing Fredy Peralta through APJ Photography. I hope they can speak the words I cannot write. Enjoy!

My first day of school is just a week away, so I’m experiencing my last fleeting hours of the Sunday that is August. That is to say, that in teacher world, we consider June to feel like a Friday, July like a Saturday, and August very much like a Sunday where you can’t quite relax and enjoy yourself because that “case of the Mondays” feeling is scratching at your front door. I get a lot of comments from non-teachers about how blissful it must be to have the summers off–and believe me it is blissful–but the week before school starts is filled with bizarre feelings and behaviors. So, for those of you always wanting to know what it’s like to be a teacher at the end of summer break, you now have to wonder no more.

The “back-to-school”nightmares is a real thing.

The time in which the first nightmare will shoot you straight up in bed varies. For me, it’s usually early August, but I have gotten a random one at the end of June (separation anxiety maybe?). The usual dream is some variation of showing up to school to do some routine “get the classroom back in order action”–in my case usually unshowered and especially unkempt–and I realize as I walk up to my classroom that there is a classroom of eager (and confused) freshmen waiting for their teacher to show up to class. The first sensation when I realize that I mixed up the first day of school date is “PUKE!” And then that feeling settles into that panicked feeling of, “do I run and pretend that I’m sick?” or “do I walk in late with absolutely nothing prepared looking like I’ve come from a week camping in the Outback?”

The strangest back-to-school nightmare I’ve had involved the way I greeted students on the first day. There I was, wrapped from neck to toe in several layers of bubble wrap, chest bumping each student as he or she entered the classroom–all to the tune of the Space Jamtheme song.

This is the copy room two weeks before school started. Everyone is already getting their copies made! (PS: that Jessica is not me. I’m not quite that on top of my game).

Thus, most back-to-school nightmares highlight a) our anxiety of not being prepared enough for a new school year b) our worry that in the two months that we got to unkink the tension knots in our backs and be real people that we forgot how to teach, and c) that we will not make the critical good first impression on our students that we need to in order to have a successful school year. Because the research states that most students make judgments on whether or not they will like a teacher and whether or not they feel they will be academically successful and socio-emotionally healthy in the class within the first few minutes of class. And they are usually right in that first impression. No pressure, huh?

So we care a lot about being prepared for that first day and that first impression. I know I’m not alone in spending hours getting my classroom in working order, making copies well in advance, and starting to practice speaking grammatically correct and clean English again.

2. We go a bit nutty over school supplies.

This is a bit of an understatement. There is a knowing look that teachers exchange between each other when we see other teachers at Office Max holding the same coupon clippings in their hands.

Teachers, as you probably already know, spend a lot of their own money on classroom decor, organizational supports, classroom sets of art supplies, and school supplies for low income students. And we only get to write $250 of it off on our taxes. So, we look for deals and free stuff wherever we can, because teachers never feel more broke at the start of the school year after they’ve bought all things needed get the classroom to its effective academic learning environment glory.

My strategy, because I’m especially broke right now, is to obsessively check freecycle.org, the free section of Craiglist, and my community swap and sell page on Facebook. And there are occasional jackpots. Just the other day, I answered a freecycle.org ad for 1,000 FREE PENS. Yes, they have advertising on them, but hey, they work! Every teacher I’ve told about this find has gasped and cheered with me about my good fortune.

I’ve got pens for days!!

Writing utensils, when you teach high school at least, are a hot commodity. I get asked probably 11.7 times a day for a pen. And because I don’t want 2% of my paycheck to go to buying pens due to the low return rate of said pens, I get creative. In the past I’ve:

Had students give me a shoe in exchange for a pen. But one time I had a student with feet so smelly I had to quickly give him his shoe back and change the policy to “some sort of valuable item” (i.e. their cell phone).

Spent hours attaching obnoxious fake flowers to the ends of pens and pencils, and “planted” them nicely in a pot, thinking it would cause students to garden each day when they returned the utensils to me on the way out. But what I thought was obnoxious was “cool” to the high schoolers, and those puppies were stolen before I could even get through Of Mice and Men.

Attached stickers of Barbie and 90s boy bands to my pens and pencils thinking that again, the students would be dismayed at their utensil and want to swiftly return them. But as in above, they started trading them like baseball cards.

I know that it’s good for executive functioning to help students remember to bring a utensil. But I also don’t want to spend any of my precious class time arguing with the one student who forgets a utensil every single day. Because yes, there is always that one student. Instead, I will provide that student with one of 1,000 pens I have in my classroom right now. And yes, teacher friends, I am sharing if you need a hook up.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was climbing into tombs. Now I’m excavating all of my classroom materials out of dusty boxes.

The view from the airplane landing in Chicago. Photo cred: Ami Relf (seeing as I am too scared to look out of plane windows).

I have safely returned to the Windy City, but I can’t stop daydreaming about my time in Mexico. It was beautiful and filled with cup-runneth-over joy. I wrote several blogs while there, but because of spotty internet and the fact that I always wanted to be out tasting moles and dancing at festivals, I will post them over the next several days.

But until then, check out this little film that I think best represents my month in Oaxaca. To create it, I used the app “1 Second Everyday“–an easy-to-use app that creates souvenirs more meaningful than t-shirts.